Thursday, 13 December 2007

Activision's Guitar Hero is a problem child

Activision are battling more than just Slash when it comes to Guitar Hero III.

Harmonix, who were the people behind the original Guitar Hero series, went off to create Rock Band with EA and MTV, which obviously created some bad blood. As is well known, the guitar controllers for Rock Band are incompatible with GH III, and vice versa.

So the people at Harmonix put their differences aside and produced a patch to let GH controllers work on Rock Band. Nice.

However, the people at Activision don't like this 'freedom of choice' and so are blocking the release of the patch. The patch is with Sony, but Sony won't release it due to "Activision's continued objection".

On the other side of the coin, Activision are now being sued over an issue on the Wii version of the game. Instead of the advertised Dolby Pro Logic II output, the Wii version apparently produces mono audio output instead.

Although a patch has been promised for early 2008, this isn't quick enough for one consumer and they have brought action against Activision for 'continuing to engage in deceptive practises' - in other words, still selling the game without so much as adding a sticker to the box that states the truth of the current audio output.

Maybe Activision should allow one patch and create another (a sticky box patch) to fix their problems, rather than letting their legal team lead the way. After all, think of the additional controllers they will sell for people who want to rock out on both GH and Rock Band with their friends whilst the additional Rock Band controllers are unavailable.

1 Comments:

This is a crazy story. We talk about this issue everyday. Its very annoying, especially since both sides came out before either game was released and told the general public that the controllers would be cross compatible.